The Burning House by Anders Walker

Author:Anders Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Cantos

JAMES JACKSON KILPATRICK, balding and bespectacled, looked out the window of his North Fourth Street office in Richmond and winced. Few understood the symbolic importance of Atticus Finch better than he, editor of Richmond’s News Leader and the recipient of Harper Lee’s hotly worded letter in January 1966. An Okie by birth, Kilpatrick had spent his professional career in Virginia, moving to Richmond shortly after graduating from the University of Missouri and rising rapidly through the News Leader’s ranks from cub reporter to lead editor. He made fast friends with prominent Virginians, including the state’s most renowned senator, Harry F. Byrd, who applauded the young journalist’s commitment to southern traditions, including segregation. However, Kilpatrick rejected the lowbrow racism and violence of the Ku Klux Klan. Like Harper Lee, he saw segregation through the lens of mutual harmony and pluralism. Recounting his own childhood in Oklahoma, Kilpatrick recalled that blacks “had their lives; we had ours,” and interactions between the two, though common, were governed by established norms. “There were certain things one did,” explained Kilpatrick, “and there were certain things one did not do.” For example, “a proper white child obeyed the family Negroes, ate with them, bothered them, teased them, loved them, lived with them, [and] learned from them.” However, “one did not intrude upon their lives, or ask about Negro institutions, or bring a Negro child in the front door.” At once separate and unequal, race relations in the South were also characterized by “an oddly intimate remoteness,” as Kilpatrick put it, an arrangement much like the one enjoyed by Atticus and Calpurnia that facilitated the perpetuation of what Kilpatrick termed a “dual society” preferable to the integrated chaos of the North. “In plain fact,” Kilpatrick argued, “the relationship between white and Negro in the segregated South, in the country and in the city, has been far closer, more honest, less constrained, than such relations generally have been in the integrated North.”1

Much like Mockingbird lent Jim Crow a coat of respectability, so too did Kilpatrick seek to maintain a spirit of gentility and cultural sophistication at the News Leader, even to the point of humiliating less-educated whites. Upon hearing that Harper Lee had been censored in Hanover County, for example, Kilpatrick indicted the schoolboard for possessing “the kind of small-bore stupidity” that had plagued the South since 1954, a stupidity that, in Kilpatrick’s view, “deserves to be roundly condemned.”2

Kilpatrick had battled local morons for over a decade, working hard to demonstrate that a commitment to segregation need not amount to a rejection of the mind, including literature and the arts. In 1958, for example, Kilpatrick reached out to Ezra Pound, one of the world’s most renowned poets, and asked him to contribute to the News Leader as a foreign correspondent. The move was audacious. Originally from Ohio, Pound had left the United States for Europe in 1908 at age twenty-two, eventually settling in London, where he proceeded to promote young, largely unknown artists who struck him as talented.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.